Alice Miller sees the roots of worldwide violence in the fact that children are beaten all over the world, especially during their first years, when their brain becomes structured.. The damages caused by this practice are devastating, but unfortunately hardly noticed by society.

Since adolescence I have always wondered why people take pleasure in humiliating others. Clearly the fact that some people are sensitive to the suffering of others proves that the destructive urge is not a universal aspect of human nature. So why do some tend to solve their problems by violence while others don't?

Philosophy failed to answer my question, and the Freudian theory of the death wish has never convinced me. It was only by closely examining the childhood histories of murderers, especially mass murderers, that I began to comprehend the roots of good and evil: not in the genes, as commonly believed, but often in the earliest days of life. Today, it is inconceivable to me that a child who comes into the world among attentive, loving and protective parents could become a predatory monster. And in the childhood of the murderers who later became dictators, I have always found a nightmarish horror, a record of continual lies and humiliation, which upon the attainment of adulthood, impelled them to acts of merciless revenge on society. These vengeful acts were always garbed in hypocritical ideologies, purporting that the dictator's exclusive and overriding wish was the happiness of his people. In this way, he unconsciously emulated his own parents who, in earlier days, had also insisted that their blows were inflicted on the child for his own good. This belief was extremely widespread a century ago, particularly in Germany.

I found it logical that a child beaten often would quickly pick up the language of violence. For him, this language became the only effective means of communication available. Yet what I found to be logical was apparently not so to most people.

When I began to illustrate my thesis by drawing on the examples of Hitler and Stalin, when I tried to expose the social consequences of child abuse, I encountered fierce resistance. Repeatedly I was told, "I, too, was a battered child, but that didn't make me a criminal." When I asked for details about their childhood, I was always told of a person who loved them, but was unable to protect them. Yet through his or her presence, this person gave them a notion of trust, and of love.

I call these persons helping witnesses. Dostoyevsky, for instance, had a brutal father, but a loving mother. She wasn't strong enough to protect him from his father, but she gave him a powerful conception of love, without which his novels would have been unimaginable. Many have also been lucky enough to find later both enlightened and courageous witnesses, people who helped them to recognize the injustices they suffered, to give vent to their feelings of rage, pain and indignation at what happened to them. People who found such witnesses never became criminals.

Anyone addressing the problem of child abuse is likely to be faced with a very strange finding: it has frequently been observed that parents who abuse their children tend to mistreat and neglect them in ways resembling their own treatment as children, without any conscious memory of their own experiences. It is well known that fathers who bully their children through sexual abuse are usually unaware that they had themselves suffered the same abuse. It is mostly in therapy, even if ordered by the courts, that they discover, stupefied, their own history, and realize thereby that for years they have attempted to act out their own scenario, just to get rid of it.

How can this be explained? After studying the matter for years, it seems clear to me that information about abuse inflicted during childhood is recorded in our body cells as a sort of memory, linked to repressed anxiety. If, lacking the aid of an enlightened witness, these memories fail to break through to consciousness, they often compel the person to violent acts that reproduce the abuse suffered in childhood, which was repressed in order to survive. The aim is to avoid the fear of powerlessness before a cruel adult. This fear can be eluded momentarily by creating situations in which one plays the active role, the role of the powerful, towards a powerless person.

But this is not an easy path to rid oneself of unconscious fears. And this is why the offence is ceaselessly repeated. A steady stream of new victims must be found, as recently demonstrated by the paedophile scandals in Belgium. To his dying day, Hitler was convinced that only the death of every single Jew could shield him from the fearful and daily memory of his brutal father. Since his father was half Jewish, the whole Jewish people had to be exterminated. I know how easy it is to dismiss this interpretation of the Holocaust, but I honestly haven't yet found a better one. Besides, the case of Hitler shows that hatred and fear cannot be resolved through power, even absolute power, as long as the hatred is transferred to scapegoats. On the contrary, if the true cause of the hatred is identified, is experienced with the feelings that accompany this recognition, blind hatred of innocent victims can be dispelled. Sex criminals stop their depredations if they manage to overcome their amnesia and mourn their tragic fate, thanks to the empathy of an enlightened witness. Old wounds can be healed if exposed to the light of day. But they cannot be repudiated by revenge.

A Japanese crew shot a film of therapeutic work in a prison in Arizona, where the method was based, inter alia, on my books. I was sent the video cassette and found the results very revealing. The inmates worked in groups, talked a lot about their childhood, and some of them said, "I've been all over the place, and killed innocent people to avoid the feelings I have today. But I know that I can bear these feelings in the group, where I feel safe. I no longer need to run around and kill, I'm at home here, and I recognize what happened. The past recedes, and my anger along with it."

For this process to succeed, the adult who has grown up without helping witnesses in his childhood needs the support of enlightened witnesses, people who have understood and recognized the consequences of child abuse. In an informed society, adolescents can learn to verbalize their truth and to discover themselves in their own story. They will not need to avenge themselves violently for their wounds, or to poison their systems with drugs, if they have the luck to talk to others about their early experiences, and succeed in grasping the naked truth of their own tragedy. To do this, they need assistance from persons aware of the dynamics of child abuse, who can help them address their feelings seriously, understand them and integrate them, as part of their own story, instead of avenging themselves on the innocent.

I have wrongly been attributed the thesis according to which every victim inevitably becomes a persecutor, a thesis that I find totally false, indeed absurd. It has been proved that many adults have had the good fortune to break the cycle of abuse through knowledge of their past. Yet I can certainly aver that I have never come across persecutors who weren't victims in their childhood, though most of them don't know it because their feelings are repressed. The less these criminals know about themselves, the more dangerous they are to society. So I think it is crucial for the therapist to grasp the difference between the statement, "every victim ultimately becomes a persecutor," which is false, and "every persecutor was a victim in his childhood," which I consider true. The problem is that, feeling nothing, he remembers nothing, realizes nothing, and this is why surveys don't always reveal the truth. Yet the presence of a warm, enlightened witness - therapist, social aid worker, lawyer, judge - can help the criminal unlock his repressed feelings and restore the unrestricted flow of consciousness. This can initiate the process of escape from the vicious circle of amnesia and violence.

Alice Miller, January 12, 1923 - April, 14 2010 - PhD in philosophy, psychology and sociology, as well as a researcher on childhood, is the author of 13 books, translated into thirty languages. This article was first published in 1997.

Reader Comments

Apparently, according to a German article Alice Miller herself was not able to break the cycle of intergenerational abuse and took out her hate and frustration on her son, Martin Miller, who wrote a book about his mother.
Alice Miller who was considered a child's advocate by the world did not defend her child against the beatings of his father and he was even sent to a member of their family and when he was six years old he was sent to a children's home.

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Sometimes I wonder whether Alice Miller served a certain purpose, a-blame-the-parents-for-everything stance, which is used by the child protection industry and governments all over the world.

One of the worst curses to have is to be enshrined (by a generally dark and ignorant populace or, a particular segment of said dark and ignorant populace) as a 'hero' or, 'heroine', as is the case of Ms. Miller.

And in many of these cases, the 'hero' or, the 'heroine' brings it upon herself.

There are many many dangers in this world of darkness. Popularity and approval from the masses being one of them.

I don't think Alice Miller was a fraud, but neither was she extraordinary in any real sense.

After reading this article I was faced with a number of conflicting interpretation of the points made by the author. In general I feel that the author has in her way, based on a number of credentials, made some simplified assumptions regarding the development of the human organism. She has chosen to ignore the data regarding psychopathic personalities, their formation and genetic influences. She repeatedly refers to a lack of empathy as part of the problem but ignores the influence of inherited genes in this aberration. She almost casually proposes, "Today, it is inconceivable to me that a child who comes into the world among attentive, loving and protective parents could become a predatory monster." She goes on to state that there are no genetic traits that might contribute to the violent and humiliating behavior of children and adults, its all blamed on the corporeal punishment used by adults to obtain a child's compliance or to correct what is viewed as unacceptable behavior. While I too agree that the use of physical punishment is abused by many parents because of numerous reasons, I do not see that the elimination of physical punishment will necessarily result in normal well adjusted children. The problem with this thesis is that it attempts to simplify the complexity of issues dealing with human development into several issues that the author feels strongly about rather than point out the complexity of issues and the uncertainty of understanding specifically how the experiences of growing up result in the personality that we view as an adult. I think the author reflects confidence in her accomplishments and education as validation of her thesis, rather than reflecting her increasing understanding of the complexity and futility in generalizing regarding human development. Unfortunately her thesis may discourage people from understanding the real damage that psychopathic personalities deal to our race and what specifically creates these aberrant personalities..

I didn't come from this type of home, I had an over protective and nurturing Mother, and that creates a different set of problems, sometimes. And My parents are still married after 45 years, even though they've had ups and downs, they've managed to overcome all their problems.

What Miller says is very much in line with my experience. I have mingled with all social classes, subcultures and many nationalities. People seem to trust me and tell me very personal things. Violent people were very often treated with violence in their childhood. Some realise the evil in this and swear never to do this to anybody, some learn with the help of others.

I 've had loving parents, was never beaten. My parents were my friends and let me explain myself, and explained their views as well. Even very young kids understand very well. There is never a necessity to beat a child.

with these characterizations based on what we think we know, are there things we don't know? Right off the bat, this is simply not provable through repeatable, consistent science. In order for it to be true, every single case of trauma would have to be explainable. While, in theory, this is possible, it practice I find this argument to be lacking in its completeness.

I would state that the characterization of the brain used in the above video may be inaccurate. The human mind almost certainly exists beyond the brain and some brain neuroscientists have essentially uncovered this through unexplainable, measurable phenomena. ie, It is dubious the brain is what this author and science believes it to be. Human physical response is often measured in advance of brain activity. So, in fact, the brain may actually be measuring or capturing response to our experiences rather than creating our experiences. And, that means the creation of our experiences may not even lie within the brain or our physical being. Who said our our life force actually had to exist within the body? Or be of the physical body?

So, certainly we can all appreciate violence is determined in some part by childhood development and exposure at a young age to trauma. But, we can also see that two children can experience the same childhood trauma with very different outcomes. No explanation for this phenomena ever consistently works. So, it isn't science but rather conjecture. Additionally, scientists just showed in lab mice that trauma can be handed down through DNA not only from parents but from their parent's parents. Beyond that we now see that the type of gut bacteria can determine our emotional state of being and create trauma. The reality is all over the map and there is no over-arching repeatable scientific explanation for violence.

Then there is the outright evil of certain people incapable of any type of connection to the world around it. This can be captured in brain scans. But, it's really that the human ego is unable to connect to the place within us where love resides. It is a disconnected state of being. Which, by the way, is the basis for the concept of hell. Judaism believes that being separate from God is suffering. That could easily be characterized as the disconnected ego is separated from our mind's higher power or from God's love.

So, what exactly is the ego? Or what creates this disconnection in people who are actually able to exploit others without a care in the world for the pain and suffering they create? Is that childhood violence? And, if it is, how do you characterize predators who may have had reasonably normal upbringings yet are capable of intense amounts of evil? ie, The level of crime is not always consistent with the level of trauma.

Many ancient mystics thought the ego to be the devil. Is it a form of universal evil that exists in the mind of all men? Do you really know? In fact, what do you really know? Not a lot. Most brain science is junk science. The New Yorker did a story on this about a year ago and said most neuroscientific beliefs about the mind were collapsing. And they interviewed many scientists who confirmed this to be the case.

The reality is we really don't know as much as we think we do. So, while I applaud this work, it clearly should not be presented as an absolute as the video characterizes and the associated text infers. Certain childhood traumas can and do lead to violence in this world. To people who seek to ameliorate their inner demons by exploiting others. But, I think we need to keep an open mind. We are extremely ignorant as a species. And, western civilization is even more ignorant because of its lack of maturity. Many experiences and much knowledge of eastern civilizations recognizes this due to the fact that they have had longer time to coalesce understanding about that ignorance. Our knowledge as a species hasn't yet left the primitive experiences of a small child.